I will use the gin barrel to age a sour honey saison 

Brewed this yesterday. Ended up with ~11.5 gallons @ 1.070, so just on target. Pitched the bugs at 9pm. Airlock activity was vigorous enough by 3am to wake me (thank goodness my wife is out of town!).

The cerealization step with the buckwheat was interesting. I ended up with nearly 3 gallons of a semi-gelatinous oatmeal-like mush at the beginning that jammed up the sparges and slowed the whole process. It took 3 full sparges to get all the sugar out. Gonna be good food for the wild yeasts.

The other interesting part was getting the CMY-01 yeast. Turns out it is not commercially available. It is the house yeast at Crooked Stave. Thing is, when CS bottles, they always add some champagne yeast. This has two effects: 1) gives a bright carbonation; 2) limits people's ability to harvest their house yeast without a formal microbiology lab. However, Evil Twin did a collaboration with CS and made a beer with just the CS house yeasts. The ET bottle was NOT finished with champagne yeast. I was able to prop up bottle dregs, and the starter I made was very fruity, estery in the nose, as it should be.

I had everything cleaned up by 3 PM yesterday.  OG 1.060.  Sample had some nice orange flavor.  Air lock activity this morning.  It's rolling.

in case you don't follow JesterKing Brewing:

 

http://jesterkingbrewery.com/jester-king-homebrew-recipes-part-ii

 

Ol Oi is my favorite beer i've had since i started using Untappd. It will be tough to really recreate what JesterKing does because of their house and 'wild' yeasts, but a hell of a reference here.

I like when breweries post recipes or give hints as to what is in their beer. I also like when the are vague in spots. It allows for some fun guessing games.

i think brewdog recently posted a ton of their recipes as well...

https://www.brewdog.com/lowdown/blog/diy-dog

Grapefruit Citra IPA

I was very happy with how this came out so time to do another IPA with citrus zest.  Brewing this after work.

Lemon Lime IPA

6.0 lb 2 row malt

.5 lb Flaked barley

.25 lb Crystal 20L malt

All Sorachi Ace hops 11.9% AA

.375 oz first wort

.375 oz 60 min

.5 oz 15 min

.5 oz 10 min

.5 oz 5 min

.75 oz flameout

1 oz 7 day dry hop

Zest one lemon and one lime and add to mash

Zest one lemon and one lime and add to wort at flameout

Safale US-05 dry yeast (no starter)

Mash 151 for 60 minutes.  Boil 60 minutes.  Chill and pitch yeast.  1 week before bottling add the dry hops.

 Madtree (Cincy) posts or otherwise makes available all of their recipes.

Pretty nice. So they give you the grains and the hops and you need to figure out yeast and process (temps, etc.).  I like that.

Maris Otter / Challenger SMaSH (11 quarts)

I tasted this after 6 weeks and it is already a fine English Barleywine.  I'll need to resist the temptation to drink them all right away.  The extended boil and boiling down some of the first runnings certainly adds complexity to the beer.

Orange is the new Brown (11 qt)

This turned out pretty nice.  Not as much orange flavor as expected but still noticeable and good.

Lemon Lime IPA

I bottled this up last night.  The sample was nice, a decent amount of lemon and lime and plenty of bitters to balance it out.  It will be a nice spring time IPA.

I'd drink both of those.